It's official...I hate blogging

The more people's blogs I read, the more "How I Feel About Blogging" entries I see.

Thanks for your honesty. Meagan. I did find your comment on the course web page. Sometimes you need to refresh your browser window, by holding down the shift key and clicking the "refresh" or "reload" button. That will force your browser to download the current version of the web page.

I do find that the classroom conversations go much more smoothly when students have a chance to communicate outside of the classroom. Or, to put it another way, when students walk into a classroom as blank slates, with no idea of what anyone else thinks on the subject, there's usually a lot of down time as people figure out something to talk about.

On a practical note, regarding comments, several times a day, I go through all the list of "pending" comments and approve all the class-related ones. You can help this along, by checking your blog and approving the comments that your peers have posted, but I don't expect people to do that. That is, of course, why I ask that you post your comments a couple days before class meets, so that there is time for me to approve them and time for your peers to read them.

Other strategies to help you find the comments you posted might include adding a page to your "Favorites" list every time you leave a comment, or just using Google to look for your name on the blogs.setonhill site. Enter site:blogs.setonhilll.edu to limit Google's search to your name.

Yet another strategy is to start a blog entry and save it as a "draft," and start writing your next blog portfolio now -- you can add a line there for each entry you post, and the extra 10 seconds you spend on each post will save you a lot of time down the road.

If I didn't ask students to blog, I would have to have some other way to check up on students to see whether they are keeping up with the readings, such as pop quizzes.

I do recognize that, in my effort to offer several different kinds of teaching instruction, some methods are going to work better than others for individual students. So, it's OK if the course blogs aren't your favorite method of learning.

Meanwhile, I look forward to more great in-class conversations.

Thanks for all the comments and the help. I didn't want to complain about this whole process or anything because I can understand the whole point of blogging, I was just getting very, very frustrated with the whole situation. It's just not for me I suppose. But for evaluating students, I can see a point and it does make sense.

But your suggestions really helped me and I'll be sure to use them in the future!

I'm glad to hear it, Meagan.

Please feel free to tell me more about how you learn best, so that I keep adjusting my strategies to offer the most help to the greatest number of students.